


Triumph

by TeaRoses



Category: Black Jack - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-08
Updated: 2013-01-08
Packaged: 2017-11-24 03:46:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/630040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeaRoses/pseuds/TeaRoses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dr. Kiriko has watched many people die, but he never expected the great Dr. Black Jack to be one of them.  An AU take on "Two Doctors of Darkness."  Written for springkink on LiveJournal for the prompt "Sickness shows us what we are."  Subtly slashy (I hope) but not outright slash this time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Triumph

The spots have nearly covered Black Jack’s arms and torso, and I think it won’t be long until he dies. I can hope that, at least.

In a real hospital, with a team of doctors, there might be a way to save him. But he fears the spread of the Satan bacteria far too much to allow me to bring him off the island or radio for help. If he had discovered the vaccine after all, then he would let me take the risk, but he did not find it. As for me, I admitted long ago that I am far more skilled at death than life, and there is no possibility that I will cure the great Dr. Black Jack. I am used to acceptance, to despair, but I can’t imagine what it cost him to give up hope. 

When I was in the military they gave me an injection against anthrax which seems to have saved me now, because anthrax is the basis of Satan. But it nearly killed me at the time, and one of my comrades was buried discreetly a week later, so that is of no use to anyone else. However it does seem that I can leave this place, once he is gone.

Rock was the last of the others to die, hours after Midori did, delirious and screaming by the end. I argued with Black Jack, told him to let me euthanize him, but he refused. He was still working on the vaccine, but with hardly a clue to go on. In the end we sat by the boy’s bedside, and Black Jack told him Midori had recovered and gone to the mainland for help. It was a silly lie, but with his brain half-gone Rock believed it, and maybe it was soothing to him. My machine would have been more soothing but I could already see the red marks on Black Jack’s skin and I didn’t want to fight with him.

That was when Black Jack told me to leave, because I was no longer needed to help with the others. I am certain he feared I would use my machine to end his life and his ordeal. He was still walking then, but already in severe pain. In the end I made strict promises to do nothing to hasten his death, no matter what happens, and I will keep them though he has no way of enforcing his orders. There are no such things as ghosts, but I have some small sense of honor and this man has earned my respect. If he wants his suffering so badly, as incomprehensible as that is to me, I will hold back.

I inject him with as much morphine as he will let me use, and spend most of my time at his bedside. He still thinks clearly enough to wonder why I am always there, though he knows he has exhausted all possibilities of finding a cure. I actually try to use boredom as an excuse. Why do I need to pretend not to care, now when it doesn’t matter a damn? 

He has a story for me tonight, about a pregnant woman whose life he saved in the Middle East many years ago. From anyone else I wouldn’t believe such a thing, that they would risk their life traveling in a war-torn country illegally to save one woman and her baby, but I’m certain he must have done it.

“I had to operate on the pulmonary artery, and then parts of her brain. They told me that it would never be successful, that the mother and child would die… but they didn’t.”

“You should have written it up for the medical journals,” I tell him.

“As if they would take the work of an unlicensed doctor…” He says it without bitterness.

“They never take mine, either.” I laugh, also without bitterness this time.

“I don’t know what happened to her,” he tells me. “I never heard from them again. For all I know she died the next year. But she lived long enough to have her baby. It was a boy.”

“Did she name him Black Jack?” I ask with half a smile.

This time he laughs a little. “But what if her son grew up and had a child…” he trails off weakly, and I put his oxygen mask back on.

“Just what the world needs. More people.”

He shakes his head, but he can’t talk with the mask on and he knows he needs it.

I sleep in the next room, with the door open, though there is little enough I can do if an alarm goes off. For anyone else I would say that he does not want to die alone but maybe I’m the last person he wants to be at his side when he finally loses the fight. But it’s too late for that; I’m here.

In the morning I change the bag of intravenous solution and eat some bread sitting by his side. When he opens his eyes, he looks upset and ready to talk again. He still needs the mask, his oxygen levels are down, but I take it off anyway.

“You would never release the Satan bacteria into the world, would you?” he asks me urgently.

“Is that what you think of me? I’m not about to try to put the entire world out of its misery.”

“Promise me…”

“I already told you. I’m going to destroy this whole place. This was a paramilitary group, after all. They have enough explosives to level the island and I’ll use them when you’re gone.” I hate the way his face changes when I say “when you’re gone.” 

“Good.” 

I try to put the oxygen mask on again, but he pushes it away. “At least let me give you a nasal cannula instead? That way you can talk and breathe more easily.”

He nods, and keeps talking while I’m making the change.

“And promise me another thing.”

“I’ve made enough damn—“

“It’s about you.”

“You want me to carry on your legacy? Bring life instead of death? Charge outrageous prices and then collect pennies? Even if I were the miracle worker you are, I wouldn’t do it.” Perhaps I’m cruel to say these things to him now, but I’m not as good at lying as Black Jack is anyway.

“No,” he says as I insert the tubes into his nostrils.

“You want to me break the machine, promise not to give death to those who beg for it? Watching you like this has only confirmed my desire to continue my work.”

“It would be too much to expect, wouldn’t it?” he says as his head sinks into the pillow. “Well, consider one person. Take one person who comes to you, and consider that maybe there is a chance, and make them wait.”

“Believe it or not, I don’t offer death to just anyone who asks. My cases tend to be truly hopeless. Without you there to interfere with my patients, what chance would there be for them?”

“If you put as much effort into cure as you do into death…”

I shake my head and he lies silent.

Later, after I go outside just to breathe, he asks me “The first time you took someone’s life, did you feel guilty?”

“The first time I took someone’s life was not a mercy killing. It was self-defense. I was a military doctor after all.” I was very young, it seems now. And at the time I did feel guilty somehow, a doctor with blood on his hands, but I don’t say it. “And you know I feel no guilt over what I do.” That’s not always completely true either, but I’m not admitting that even now. “A man cannot triumph over death by enduring suffering before his final defeat, Dr. Black Jack."

“There is always hope. A doctor shouldn’t—“

I almost start to give examples of hopeless cases, but I’m looking at a perfect example. “Must we have this argument now?” I ask, and he shakes his head.

After a few labored breaths, he asks, “Do you believe in an afterlife?”

“If you’re asking me to reassure you, you’re asking the wrong person,” I reply.

“No. I already know what I believe.”

“I don’t. There is no soul, just an ending. I personally don’t think that is so bad. Perhaps you do.”

“Is it so terrible that I hope to see her?” he asks.

With anyone else I would think he meant a girlfriend, but I know very well who he means. “It’s nothing terrible for a child to love his mother.” 

“Did you ever love anyone?”

“Now you’re just being ridiculous.” I wonder if his brain is being affected by the disease, but probably he is using the illness as an excuse to ask me anything he likes. Tricky to the last, Dr. Black Jack. “You always have to make me out to be such a monster. I have cared for many people.”

“Are any of them still alive?”

“No, I killed each and every one of them. What the hell do you think?” I’m not really angry, though, and I feel guilty when he turns his face away and says that he is sorry.

“You can’t offend me, Dr. Black Jack. But there is no one I am going to, when I leave here, if that is what you are asking me. I’m best off alone and I always have been.”

 

Later that night, as he still clings to life despite the spots spreading over his body and the fluid building up in his lungs, I can’t help bringing the subject up myself. “You never married. Did your love for the world supersede your love for anyone person?”

He actually smiles. “Now you’re the one insulting me, making me out to be such a do-gooder. I’m only human, you know. I would have married… at least once. Perhaps I should have. And I can honestly say that I was in love, for whatever good it did me.”

“I suppose I can say that honestly also. It did me no good, and it was long ago.”

“Did she die?”

I almost go along with him, make it a story about a woman, but in the end I don’t bother. “He was a soldier, and he died in a war. And I wasn’t there, so don’t think—“

“I didn’t say anything.”

“I couldn’t fight death then, either. And I couldn’t fight the enemies that killed him. Besides, even then I realized that wasn’t the point, that we weren’t the heroes.”

“War is a hideous thing,” he says. “But that’s hardly an original thought.”

“No, but at least we agree on something.”

Much later, I feel like defending myself. “When I do offer my services to people, even to people I care for, it’s because I believe in what I do. Ending pointless suffering.”

“You think I don’t hate it when I watch people suffer, but I do also,” says Dr. Black Jack. “I’ve watched people die in agony; do you think I found it pleasant?”

“Then have you never considered that what I offer my patients is not so wrong?”

“Never,” he says firmly.

“Abolutely never?”

“Maybe once…”

I’m actually surprised to hear it, or to hear him admit it at least.

“Then will you at least consider, if all there is left for you is pain--”

“You promised,” he says flatly.

“I did.” 

Just then his back arches and he reaches out to clutch at my hand. I regret the promise profoundly at that point. I give him morphine and he lies back in the bed, silent and looking dazed.

I take his hand again. At this point I want to tell him anything --that I will dedicate my life to the good, that he will surely see his mother -- anything to make him look less agonized. But I just sit there and hope he will fall asleep now.

After a while he begins breathing more evenly and I fall asleep in the chair myself, still holding Dr. Black Jack’s hand. I wonder if I will wake next to a corpse, but sadly it won’t be that simple for him. There will be more pain before it’s finally over, and I will watch him endure it. If there is a God, and I do not believe it, then I love Dr. Black Jack far more than He does, because I would have ended this long ago. 

When I finally leave here, I will have a few errands, a few more promises. Fortunately Pinoko already has people to care for her, far more suited than me. But I will make sure they have money from the doctor, the money he saved from the few patients who really could afford his outrageous fees. And I will keep the promise I refused to make: Someday there will be a patient who will get a chance they may not want, and maybe they will have something besides more time in pain to show for it. And perhaps that will be Dr. Black Jack’s final triumph over Dr. Kiriko.


End file.
